YouTube Delivers New Desktop Design With Dark Theme, A New Logo and New Features

YouTube for desktop is getting a design makeover, today, while its mobile version is getting some new features. The design was being tested for some time, and Google has finally started rolling it out for everyone. Besides, the video streaming website has also tweaked its logo.

The redesigned desktop site is now available to all users around the world. It looks cleaner and simpler than the previous design. There is also a dark mode that comes with the new design; it swaps the white background with a black one that makes it soothing to watch at night. The new logo has a play logo in red, with YouTube written next to it, in black.

YouTube’s new logo works with multiple screen sizes; it adjusts the size according to the display size of the screen. Explaining the new logo, YouTube Chief Product Officer Neil Mohan, writes:

The bright red cherry on top of this update sundae is a refreshed YouTube Logo and YouTube Icon. Designed for our multi-screen world, the updated Logo combines a cleaned up version of the YouTube wordmark and Icon, creating a more flexible design that works better across a variety of devices, even on the tiniest screens. Why’s it more flexible? When room is limited (say on a smartphone) you can use the brightened up Icon as an abbreviated Logo, which will be seen more easily and read more clearly. You’ll see the new Logo and Icon roll out across mobile and desktop today, and across all our other apps and services soon.

These new changes to YouTube come a year after its mobile app received an interface makeover. The new desktop design is more material than the previous one, and it brings uniformity across YouTube for mobile and desktop.

New features on YouTube for mobile

Coming to the app, the company has introduced a slew of new features on it. Users on the app will now be able to control the speed of the video by double tapping on the screen to rewind and forward. Also, the app will now be able to adjust the video according to the screen positioning; it will play video vertically/horizontally according to the phone’s position. Vertical videos will have no black bars on the sides, just pure video viewing. The player will automatically shift to whatever aspect ratio you are watching the video, instead of limiting users to a 16:9 ratio.